Peter Quinn: The hidden impact of the Irish on English

[PETER QUINN is a novelist and essayist, and a chronicler of Irish-America. A
third-generation New Yorker whose grandparents were born in Ireland, Quinn is
the author of Banished Children of Eve (1994), which won the American Book
Award. This essay forms the introduction to Daniel Cassidy’s How the Irish
Invented Slang. His latest book is Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish
America.]

In 1799, troops with Napoleon’s army in Egypt unearthed an ancient tablet
inscribed with a tribute to the Pharaoh in demotic script as well as Greek and
hieroglyphs. As a result of this discovery outside the town of Rashid (Rosetta),
the Egyptologist and linguist Jean-Francois Champollion was eventually able to
reveal the meanings of a once-indecipherable language. What had been lost was
found, and historians and scholars gained a new understanding of the past.
Working with a pen (or more likely, a computer) rather than a spade, and serving
both as digger and decoder, Daniel Cassidy presents us with revelations that
are, for etymologists in general and Irish Americans in particular, every bit as
momentous as those Champollion extracted from the Rosetta stone.

The discoveries that Cassidy has gathered into How the Irish Invented Slang: the
Secret Language of the Crossroad represent a hugely significant breakthrough in
our ability to understand the origins of vital parts of the American vernacular.
He has solved the mystery of how, after centuries of intense interaction, a
people as verbally agile and inventive as the Irish could seemingly have made
almost no impression on English, a fact that H.L. Mencken, among other students
of the lan-guage, found baffling. What was missing, it turns out, wasn't a
steady penetration of Irish into English, but someone equipped with Cassidy's
genius -- a unique combination of street smarts and scholarship, of memory,
intuition, and intellect-who could discern and decipher the evidence.

Like the Frenchmen who uncovered the Rosetta stone, Cassidy's discovery began
with a serendipitous dig, a solitary stroke of the spade into the fertile earth
of his own family's history, at the spot where a piece of the past jutted above
the layers of time forgotten or obscured in the form of a single word,"Boliver"
(bailbhe, balbhán, mute, inarticulate, a silent person), the semi -affectionate,
semi-sarcastic nickname used to refer to his taciturn grandfather. Beginning
with that key, a la Champollion, Cassidy unlocks the secret of a centuries-long
infiltration of Irish into English, exactly where it would be most expected,
amid the playfully subversive, syncretic, open-ended olio of slang."We were not
balbh (mute) in Irish," writes Cassidy:

“The slang and accent of five generations and one hundred years in the
tenements, working-class neighborhoods, and old breac-Ghaeltachta (Irish-English
speaking districts) slums ('s lom, is a bleak exposed place) of Brooklyn and New
York City held within it the hard--edged spiel (speal, cutting language) and
vivid cant (caint, speech) of a hundred generations and a thousand years in
Ireland: Gaeilge, the Irish language.”...